Red Star Robot

Fan
Name:	Red Star Robot
Alias(es):	redstarrobot
Type:	fanwriter, RPGer, reccer
Fandoms:	Blake's 7, Farscape
Communities:	b7friday, b7_rpg, Crack Van
Other:
URL:	livejournal account
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Red Star Robot is a fanwriter for Blake's 7 and Farscape fandoms who was active on livejournal in the 2000s. Most of her fics are fairly short and often are drabbles.

She was one of the finalists for "Best New Writer" in The Sparky Fanfiction Awards 2004.

Fanfiction

Blake's 7

Her writing was characterized by the interest in the themes of rebellion and alienness. It often focused on the characters of Cally and Travis (played by Brian Croucher), sometimes featuring Cally/Travis pairing. Her fics, like Lyssie's, gave female characters larger roles than Blake's 7 livejournal-based fics from that period tended to do.

• Last Days of An Empire, archieved link Rumours of Death AU
• arrivals and departures, archieved link Shakespeare pastiche featuring characters from Duel
• Story using two lines from "children playing Blake's 7" community challenge, archieved link
• A humorous take on "Cally the medic" trope
• A crossover of Blake's 7 and Farscape, with Crais and Travis
• Happiness Is a Warm Gun Four 30-word fics about four characters
• Other fics in b7friday community (more of them can be seen by community members)
• some stories in Hello B7 and Farscape Story Collection (Hello Kitty AU)

Farscape

• The Goldhawk Social Club
• Three Stories About Seeing the Stars
• Other fics in farscapefriday community

Recs and Reviews

Red Star Robot also wrote some recs for Crack Van, mostly for Cally-centric fics:

[Not a Bad Dream by Lyssie]: Like all good fireworks shows, this month of Cally fic recs is going to end on a grand finale. We're going to wrap up the two-week Cally-Travis theme that's following the Cally-Avon theme, and then I've got some lovely, sparkly surprises to send everyone away happy.

Lyssie's universe is a dry, dark one; not hopeless, but demanding of its inhabitants, a world full of hard, vulnerable, tired people who try to keep going and aren't always sure why. This is the first of two consecutive character vignettes, which illustrate beautifully the appeal in putting Cally and Travis side-by-side in fic. While Travis starts the show as a nemesis and dark mirror of Blake, his role changes when he's put on trial and escapes the Federation he believed in. He starts to more closely mirror Cally; they are unwilling exiles on opposite sides, they are soldiers trying to bring down the Federation for opposite ideological reasons. This story is, as most Travis-and-Cally stories need to be, at least somewhat AU, in that it presumes Travis survived the Star One accident we're meant to believe killed him.

Her versions of Cally and Travis are painfully aware of the complications their pasts and also of the diminished circumstances of their presents, and yet they still manage to find enough common ground to walk warily around each other, perhaps enabled by the lack of any respect or other need that'd lead them to be guarded around each other. Her extrapolations of these characters, one supposed to be dead and one largely forgotten by the writers, is true to their origins and later development, not comforting or full of any resolutions for the things that haunt and drive them, and also allows each to show how they've grown and changed by the end of the story. The prose is sharp and staccato, like a 1940s noir story - these are dark streets full of characters who have seen to much. The final line is a beautiful one, both sad and full of possibilities, opening up the world for characters whose stories were presumed to have been over.

[Too Many Light Years Run by Lyssie]: With the second of Lyssie's two consecutive Cally-Travis vignettes, we've moved a year into the future and well into AU territory, with Cally having survived Terminal. She's come full-circle to who she was when she first appeared on Saurian Major: one guerrilla fighter in red leather highlighted against the horizon, alone, having survived everyone she knew, and blowing up every target she can find because it's all she can do.

(You don't think there have been enough explosions in my recs so far? Well, I wasn't kidding about ending the fireworks show with some good ones.) [excerpt from the fic]

If she's returned to her origins, Travis, on the other hand, is a man still searching for a place in his world. With one failed coup behind him, and his new enemy, the Federation he felt had betrayed him and its own ideals, on the march to even greater power, he wants one more chance to bring it down. When he finds that he and Cally are winding up in the same place for the same reasons, there's a second chance for both of them, and he winds up making her much the same offer as Blake had made to her on Saurian Major.

The interaction is fabulous; two highly-trained fighters with little to lose, one idealistic by nature and the other bullying and bitter by nature, neither trusting or liking the other, bandying pointed and dry, barbed comments to goad the other, but ultimately coming to some sort of understanding and, by implication, a common goal, despite never once forgetting how opposite their ideas and actions have always been. The immediacy of this story, aside from being one of two lost people finding purpose and allies in an empty world, lies in, as a certain other BBC science fiction show once put it, "A brilliant move. The black and white pawns don't fight each other, they join forces." This is the promise of the previous vignette realized, as roles and allegiances shift, possibilities open up, and the tense balance of control and resistance in this political landscape is restored.

["She woke to the ache of absence..." (untitled double drabble) by Hafren]: Okay, now for a few little sparkly bursts of fic in the night sky to send you all on your way.

Fresh from the loss of her sister, her home, her entire people, Cally finds an unexpected comfort and understanding. I shan't spoil it, it's such a short and sweet little appetizer of fic. This follows up on an implication of early canon that very few have played with, and which would have been fascinating had the show ever attempted to use it. Oddly, the character it rounds out isn't Cally at all, but an even more underused and overlooked character.

[Dakini by Snowgrouse]: Oh, this one is so beautifully sparkly and lush, as per Snowgrouse's prose standards. It's not just Cally as competent fighter, but as archetypal warrior; not just Cally as attractive alien telepath, but as truly alien, invasive, probing, threatening. An electric little story, beautiful stylized and seen through a haze of red, from Avon's POV.

[Oracle by Nicola Mody]: And with this one last fanfare, I'll bid you adieu.

[Disclaimer: I'm mentioned in the author's notes, so I'm not entirely an uninvolved party. However, as my involvement was limited to reading it and liking it, I think I'm still a neutral one, and it's still great fic.]

This is another small character study, taking up the implications of canon where canon itself failed to go. Bridging Redemption and Shadow, it picks up on Orac's self-serving trickery, the technology of his carrier waves, and Cally's character background, very neatly. Vila becomes suspicious of a plothole dangerous inconsistency in Orac's story and Cally takes steps to solve the problem.

Now, there is a subset of fandom that's rather anti-Orac, and not without some reason. I'm not one of them; I love the little plexiglass monster with his Christmas lights. But it's still rewarding to see him get his comeuppance, for once. To come over all pretentious for a moment, if Orac is the trickster character, the unreliable voice of fate in computer form, then here we have Cally as the show's hand of justice taking him in line, even if only temporarily, as later events show. To be a little less pretentious, but only a little, there aren't many stories that actually pick up on this specific aspect of Cally's training, perhaps because the series itself never explained what exactly she meant by it or how she used it, and only a few more that develop or use her alienness, so this is a rare demonstration of both her technical skills and her alien ones, and it's all the more rewarding as both anticipation and payback for the events of "Shadow".

Reviews of Her Stories

[Generous For One, By RedStarRobot]: Because it's the polar opposite of the last fic. Because it's the perfect illustration of why Avon/anybody is doomed, but especially Avon/Cally. Because even though there's no detail and nothing explicit, the sex is painfully real. [excerpt from the fic] Because it's a short, brutal, lovely gut-punch of a fic, just the kind redstarrobot is best at. Because you don't know whether to end up hating Avon or pitying him. Because in the end, you might just do both.

[The Goldhawk Social Club]: RedStarRobot was one of the five finalists for "best new writer" in last year's Sparky Awards, and in my opinion it's easy to tell why. She has a flair for short, intense, atmospheric pieces, getting right into a character's head and creating amazing word-pictures that suck you in utterly.

Her unique approach to things is clearly evidenced by this, her response to farscapefriday's challenge for "Zombies". I won't say too much more than that, for it would spoil the fun, but I will add that given some of the things that happen in Farscape canon, the crew of Moya somehow ending up in the seedier parts of 60's London is not only plausible but frighteningly probable.

Red's John Crichton narration is dense and perfect. Even the lapses into Britspeak seem perfectly John, a reaction to the situation. And true to John, whatever the situation, it's All About Aeryn.

It's funny, but it's also bittersweet; it's groovy, but also strangely dark. It's short but filling; it doesn't explain what's going on but somehow doesn't need to. It's 60's London on a Saturday night, Farscape-style.

[Three Stories About Seeing The Stars]: Like the last Rec, and many others before it, this story rose from one of the challenges on farscapefriday, specifically the Fairy Tale challenge. The Farscape universe being the vast and diverse place it is, the stories and myths of some of the myriad races presented proved to be an irresistible challenge.

In her typical style, however, RedStarRobot went two better and presented three legends, tied as closely together yet as individually diverse as the races that tell them. Here we find flawlessly presented the simple concept language of the giant Leviathans, the multiple parallel narrative tracks of their multitasking Pilots, and the sad, elegant speech of the Builders who brought them together.

Including an excerpt from only one of these short tales would lessen them all, so I will only encourage you to go and listen as a story begins "Once, A Leviathan..."

Websites

• Brian Croucher fan page by Red Star Robot, written in rather tongue-in-cheek manner